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December 23, 2012

Salt of the Earth gets empowered new meaning

Cheap material made from DIRT can convert heat directly to electricity: New discovery could revolutionise power generation

It is not the first, but previous ones have been derived from rare and sometimes toxic elements via costly synthesis procedures

Researchers say their discovery could pave the way for low-cost, environmentally friendly electricity generation

An incredible new material made
from common dirt can take heat and directly convert it into an
electrical current, a study claims.

Researchers
say they produced the groundbreaking substance using commonly found
materials and that it can be cheaply manufactured.

They
believe the it could spark a revolution in eco-friendly power
generation by taking waste heat from a range of common sources and
converting it directly to electricity.

Raw material: The breakthrough new
thermoelectric material is made from natural minerals called
tetrahedrites which are found in dirt pretty much everywhere on the
planet

So-called thermoelectric
materials are able to directly convert differences in temperature to
electrical voltage, and vice versa. This
are potentially important, scientists say, because the vast majority of
heat that is generated from, for example, a car engine, is lost through
the tail pipe. It's the thermoelectric material's job to take that heat and turn it into something useful, like electricity.

Such
materials have been made before, but previous examples have been
derived from rare and sometimes toxic elements, often by way of
expensive synthesis procedures.Donald Morelli, a professor of
chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University,
led the team which developed the material based on natural minerals
known as tetrahedrites.

'What
we've managed to do is synthesize some compounds that have the same
composition as natural minerals,' said Professor Morelli, director of
MSU's Centre for Revolutionary Materials for Solid State Energy
Conversion.'The mineral family that they mimic is one of the most abundant minerals of this type on Earth – tetrahedrites.

'By modifying its composition in a very small way, we produced highly efficient thermoelectric materials.'

Groundbreaking: Professor Donald Morelli, left,
led the team which developed the revolutionary material at Michigan
State University's Centre for Revolutionary Materials for Solid State
Energy Conversion, right

While the hunt for thermoelectric
materials has exercised scientists across the world, with many recent
breakthroughs, many of those found so far have been unsuitable for
large-scale applications.

Many
previous discoveries have been derived from rare or sometimes toxic
elements, or produced using synthesis procedures are complex and costly.

'Typically
you'd mine minerals, purify them into individual elements, and then
recombine those elements into new compounds that you anticipate will
have good thermoelectric properties,' said Professor Morelli.

'But that process costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. Our method bypasses much of that.'

The
MSU researchers' method involves the use of very common materials,
grinding them to a powder, then using pressure and heat to compress into
useable sizes.'It saves tremendously in terms of processing costs,' Dr Morelli added.The researchers expect this discovery could pave the way to many new, low-cost thermoelectric generation opportunities.

Potential
applications include waste heat recovery from industrial power plants,
conversion of vehicle exhaust gas heat into electricity, and generation
of electricity in home-heating furnaces.

The research, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, was published in the online journal Advanced Energy Materials.